Janet Tavakoli

"It would seem as if the low spread-low vol environment, similar to back in 2006-2007 (when investors couldn’t get enough of levered synthetic tranches) has revived some interest in portfolio credit risk. Investors may not have necessarily wanted to add leverage, but, simply put, they have had to, given the lack of alternatives."

"This time, Citigroup says, it’s doing things differently. The deals are tailored in a way that insulates it from any losses, while giving yield-starved buyers a chance to reap returns of 20 percent or more."

"We're in precarious times for sure. What we have done is unprecedented in the history of the United States. We got rid of the benchmark, the gold standard. We don’t have any any stable benchmark anymore. Instead, we have currencies that are being benchmarked off of each other. If you're measuring your weight you want a scale, right?"

Taken as a whole, Mayor Khan's presentation to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on "The Breakdown of Social Integration – The Challenge of Our Age," seemed to ignore unpleasant facts which suggest that there is more incompatibility of values than he is willing to admit -- in the interest of pushing an immigration agenda favored by his "side." Mayor Khan's presentation seemed designed to pacify Westerners and enable the spread of the rule of Islam.

“Here we are eight years later - do you think the public knows how this happened? Do you think the public knows all of the recommendations made to the Justice Department?” Pascrell said Wednesday in an interview. “Why are Hillary Clinton’s e-mails any more important?”

Call it conspiracy theory, coincidence or just bad luck, but any time someone is in a position to bring down Hillary Clinton they wind up dead. In fact, as we noted previously, there’s a long history of Clinton-related body counts, with scores of people dying under mysterious circumstances. While Vince Foster remains the most infamous, the body count is starting to build ominously this election cycle - from the mysterious "crushing his own throat" death of a UN official to the latest death of an attorney who served the DNC with a fraud suit.

The following story is guaranteed to make you sick. Once again, we’re shown that following trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts and backstops, TBTF Wall Street banks immediately went ahead and focused all their attention obtaining loopholes in order to transfer risk and make billions upon billions of dollars in the financial matrix, as opposed to adding any benefit whatsoever to society.

Moments ago, in an embarrassing setback for the president, Senate Democrats in a 52-45 vote - short of the required 60 supporters - blocked a bill that would give President Barack Obama fast-track authority to expedite trade agreements through Congress, a major defeat for the president and his allies who "say the measure is necessary to complete a 12-nation Pacific trade deal that is a centerpiece of the administration’s economic agenda." But don't count it out yet: the WSJ cites Mitch McConnell who told reporters shortly before the vote, which he expected to lose, that “This issue’s not over" adding that "I’m hopeful we’ll put this in the win column for the country sometime soon.”

Do derivatives confuse you? Do you hate bond math? We feel the same way! So we simplified your life with headache free QE math. Compounded rates, equivalent rates, production functions: who needs old math?

"The government’s bailout plan destroyed capitalism. In a capitalist system, those who stood to gain–and already made off with large gains—would have to bear the risk. The bailouts represented a corruption of capitalism. Crony capitalism violates the spirit of democracy established by the Founding Fathers of the republic known as the United States." - Janet Tavakoli

All of the suffering and hardships the majority of Americans are experiencing today are directly related to the coup pulled off by the crony financial oligarchs in the fall of 2008, and all of the media and political minions that helped them do it. People realize we have become a Banana Republic and they have now lost all hope.

Global financial markets are awash in hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of derivatives. By some estimates, the total amount exceeds one quadrillion. Derivatives played a central role in the 2008 credit crisis, as they had a brutal multiplying effect on the magnitude of the carnage. As a bad asset was written down, oftentimes there were derivative contracts written against it that resulted in total losses 10x greater than the initial write-down. But what exactly are derivatives? How do they work? And have we learned to treat these "weapons of mass financial destruction" (as Warren Buffet colorfully coined them) any more carefully in the aftermath of the global financial crisis? Not really, claims Janet Tavakoli, the danger behind derivatives doesn't lie in their existence, she stresses, but when abused, derivatives can create massive damages. So at the root of the "derivatives problem" is control fraud - the rampant unchecked criminal action by influential players on Wall Street.